Qualify and Archive Leads

Following creation of a lead, the salesperson must qualify it to know whether to expend more energy on attempting to make a sale. Knowing which leads to pursue is one of the most critical decisions a contractor can make. SolarNexus does not enforce any prescribed process for your company in qualifying the lead. It's purely up to you. However, SolarNexus provides a rich set of data fields commonly used to qualify leads on the Overview tab of the project workspace.

Defining Your Qualification Criteria

You need to define which leads to pursue and which to move on from. Consider aspects like:

• your service territory, how far are you willing to travel?
• type of customer (residential, commercial, etc)
• site quality and attributes  (solar access, quality of roof, etc)
• size opportunity / customer's energy use

Make a concise list, and input it into the Description and Completion Criteria field of the "Qualify Lead" milestone. That way your staff sees the list each and every time they qualify the lead.

If the salesperson decides that the customer's project meets your company's qualifications, he or she clicks complete on the "Qualify Lead" milestone and enters the appropriate date. This records that decision and provides an opportunity to enter notes about the decision.

Note: You can add systems to the project only after completing the "Qualify Lead" milestone.

Archiving Leads (Disqualified & Closed-Lost)

Just as important as qualifying the lead, is removing disqualified leads from your list of active opportunities. If the salesperson decides that the project does not meet your company's qualifications, he or she simply clicks the "Archive" button at the bottom of the Status section of the Management panel. Archiving the opportunity ends the project, but does not delete any of the data. To assist with marketing and customer relationship management, the salesperson can enter a predefined status change reason to track why opportunities are archived.

Note that you can and should also archive opportunities later in the process that you've lost to competitors or customer decides not to go solar.